Widowers marry again because it makes their lives easier. Widows often don't, because it makes their lives harder. [p. 61]

Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.

A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.

There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.

That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.

Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie.

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.

I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.

Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.

Memory changes as a person matures.

One who is truly confident is able to apologize.

I think love is stronger than habits or circumstances. I think it is possible to keep yourself for someone for a long time and still remember why you were waiting when she comes at last.

People are looking around. They are looking to do something with their time and money. The question is, what?

There's nothing people like better than being asked an easy question. For some reason, we're flattered when a stranger asks us where Maple Street is in our hometown and we can tell him.

I really like doing action. It's one of those things where I negotiate the world physically, I think, more than mentally. I enjoy running and jumping.

There is only one true purpose in life: to wake up from the delusion that you are separate from everything else.

I am not in the least given to any violent interest in womankind, however, such as has addled the country's brains of late. Give me a manandwoman world: 'tis good enough!

History is a pathetic junkyard of broken treaties.

Bring it on, Pinecone Face!

So I moved to Europe and only came back when directors like Robert Altman would call me after they'd seen my work in Full Metal Jacket.